Australian director John Hilcoat (The Proposition) and screenwriter Joe Penhall (Enduring Love) will have a much harder time adapting McCarthy than the Coen brothers did with No Country:The Road is an amazing, superlative book, but it is also largely plotless and relentlessly grim. As recently as November, it looked like the movie was never going to get made, mostly due to the downbeat nature of the story.

If done right, though, I think the film could turn out to be something great. Charlize Theron has been cast as Mortensen's wife, and anyone who read the book knows although the role is tiny, it also leaves a deep impression. No word yet on who will play the kid.

I'm fine with Hilcoat directing and with the cast of this film so far. I'm more concerned with Ridley Scott's attempt to adapt McCarthy's Blood Meridian, a monster epic that would have taxed Kubrick in his prime. It's one of those books that doesn't seem filmable to me, given its sweep, scale, ultra-violence, idiosyncratic nature and monstrously challenging characters, not to mention how much of it gets "told" on a purely metaphorical level. Frankly, I can't think of any living director who could handle it.

If deftly handled, Mr. Hillcoat will give us a genuine offering of this most Gnostic tale. Thrown in medias res into "the broken world" of some distant demiurge, we may watch the boy, and his father, "we're the good guys, right, because we have the fire inside us", symbolically make their way past the "archons" who impede the way. So much of this masterful novel is pure Sethian and Valentinian Gnosticism, and if understood properly, is not the "downer" book many have rendered it.

Not sure about the above references to Sethian Gnosticism, but I do have to agree that, while the setting may be grim, the message of love and sacrifice presented in THE ROAD are anything but a downer. I just wish no recognizable actors had been cast....

Not sure about the above references to Sethian Gnosticism, but I do have to agree that, while the setting may be grim, the message of love and sacrifice presented in THE ROAD are anything but a downer. I just wish no recognizable actors had been cast....